[tex-live] LaTeX enhancement

[Alois Steindl]

On Dienstag, 7. September 2004 23:32, david.boerschlein at pb.com wrote:
> We have the TexLive distribution., which appears not to have the source
> code for the latex command.
>
> We are in need of an enhancement to the LaTeX command-line so that it will
> read a list of tex filenames from either STDIN or disk and, for each
> filename in the list, create a DVI file without forking and execing each
> time.    We have 80,000 tex files to process for a typical run to create
> 80,000 dvi files.   Alternately, we could give it the name of a directory
> and expect latex to process all the tex files in the directory.
>
> We have the C expertise to make such an enhancement.
>
> Please advise.     Thanks.
>
Hello,
I might sound harsh, but I doubt that the C expertise will be sufficient:
You should have found out meanwhile that latex isn't a program itself, but it 
is usually a link to a tex (or etex)-executable. Your TeXLive distribution 
certainly has the source files, could be in something named "CWEB" or "WEB". 
When all tex files use the same packages, you might be better off by 
generating a format file, which has all these packages preloaded, so that 
LaTeX doesn't need to read these every time. You could also prepare a minimal 
texmf tree, which contains just the necessary files for the run and hold it 
on a ram disk, that would speed up the process.
Alois